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So there isn't a provision to account for lower tiers during suspects, but what about using lower tiers as evidence for whether or not a pokemon is broken? Screw what UU wants, but the fact that tera isn't as broken there (even in the context where it isn't an official meta) should hold some weight, shouldn't it?
I think you’re conflating arguments here, and being a bit dismissive. The question wasnt about if UU should be tiered here, but rather that people playing pre-UU are reporting a very different feeling on Tera. This IS important data, because its direct proof against the claim that there is a near-endless well of Tera Abusers. It changes the ban vs no-ban discussion significantly if we believe tera will require 3-6 mon bans to be balanced vs 10+, and Pre-UU experience seems to be telling us the former.
This is silly. We have no way of predicting how many things will be broken in future metagames that do not exist and your suggestion hinges entirely on theorymon, which is not allowed in these threads. I highly doubt this suspect results in an outright ban, but the data from non-OU metagames just does not matter for OU. It never has in any past setting and it never will. Same goes for UU decisions impacting RU/NU, which has also come into play before with certain bans. And so on.
We have made this abundantly clear in this suspect already and it's unfortunate that we have to go back to it again and again. It is not dismissive so much as it is just a factual bit of our tiering system. Any further posts about this will just be deleted
…then is saying “new broken mons will appear” without proof also not allowed? Because that has not been the vibe throughout the test, and has been a major pro-ban argument.
…then is saying “new broken mons will appear” without proof also not allowed? Because that has not been the vibe throughout the test, and has been a major pro-ban argument.
Neither side should be hinging an argument on this, correct. I have deleted dozens of posts on both sides and a number for this very reason.
We try to let more posts than not go because otherwise moderating would become a fully fledged job, but it's a fundamental principal of tiering to not focus predominantly on theorymon and instead focus on the metagame the suspect is taking place in.
Hello OU. I am a bit late to the party, but whatever...
I do believe a full-ban is the best long-term solution (especially from a tiering perspective), but I wanted to go over the proposed restrictions and elaborate why, imo, the 1-Tera per Team option is a good restrictive option and offers certain positive effects to the metagame.
Team-Preview:
This option has some sort of hype behind it that I, quite honestly, do not understand. First of all, VGC does it mainly due to technical reasons and they show alot more than just tera-types to the opponent. Secondly, VGC does alot of dumb shit aswell that nobody would want to have in OU, e.g 20 minute timer, item clause, etc. Also do not forget that 99% of VGC (and BSS) players will never play in a tournament and play ladder only where these team-sheets showcasing tera-types do NOT exist. Tera-Captains has some precedent from Draft-League, but I dont think thats a great argument either.
Now onto the actual impact of the preview-option. I am not convinced this option has too much of an impact onto the metagame. The most common tera types are known or can be guessed rather accurately already. It does stop random bullshittery, yet introduces more options to "bullshit" your opponent, like fake-lure sets (e.g dragonite tera fire, doesnt run fire move). Im sure theres better examples, please no hate. Overall I would describe the effectiveness of this option with a curve that converges towards 0. The longer the metagame goes the less effective this option becomes, until something more radically has to be done.
1 Tera per team:
To me, this one is the best restriction. It is, truly, a good compromise between full-ban and no-action. While team-preview is very close to no-action, this one restricts the mechanic alot more, but in a way that shouldnt dissatisfy tera-enjoyers. You gain certainty that 5/6 of your opponents mons cannot tera at any time, a big aspect that annoys people. You remove alot of the "paranoia" or "mindgame-pressure" that people complain about but still keep some surprise factor by not knowing their tera type. Not only does it keep the creative aspect of tera, it improves it.
Why does it do that? Well, when tera was first announced and explained via trailers and leaks, one big thing to be hyped about was changing mons with shit typing into a good type to make them viable, salvaging mons by giving them a better defensive profile. The prime example is probably (Fairy)-Avalugg. In the current tera or a potential preview-tera metagame, there is barely any incentive to run niche/lower-tier mons or "shitmons" and turn them into good/viable mons by using tera on them. The nature of vanilla-tera, being able to tera any mon at any time, just heavily discourages this.
Like, there is not much reason to not run 6 strong/top-tier mons and fix the teams holes with tera, or bruteforce through checks. Mathematically, tera is a %-based boost (33% more dmg on stab, 50% more on coverage etc). The mechanic, obviously, improves the strongest mons the most, because the higher your number is before tera, the more you get out of it.
HOWEVER, the biggest offender here is the flexibility. Giving yourself the highest amount of mons that can use tera but still function fine without it, gives you the most flexibility. Hence running 6 strong/broken mons with complementing tera-types is the absolute best way to use tera, no questions asked. Running Tera blast? Barely any mon does that because of the big opportunity cost. If you do not tera that mon, its a dead moveslot. The same applies to unviable mons that become viable IF you change their type. The opportunity cost is way too high in most cases because you have to tera that mon for it to be useful. You are in the position where you either run a unviable/weak mon or give away your tera mon (and potentially type) immediately. You free your opponent from the "mindgame-pressure" and make his decision-making alot easier, you basically put yourself at a disadvantage from the start.
The 1 Tera per Team option punishes you alot less for running creative mons/sets (+terablast), especially mons that do not see play in OU but can be viable with tera slapped onto them because you reduce the importance of tera-flexibility. Of course the strongest tera-abusers are still gonna be played alot, but you do know which mon is gonna tera and can play around it more easily. You do not have to ask yourself "is he gonna tera garg, moon or ape this game?". The biggest positive however is, that your opponent knows your tera-mon anyway, meaning you have more reason to run mons that NEED tera to be good, increasing the mon diversity overall. As I see it, vanilla tera reduces mon diversity because you want the highest flexibility possible on who to tera while trying to hold back your "out-of-jail-for-free"-card as long as possible.
Now people are gonna say: "but this turns the meta into MU-fishy HO?!". We can only speculate how a meta is gonna develop, but I do not believe its gonna be much worse than it is right now. The meta is already heavily offensive and MU-heavy due to tera benefitting (the best) offensive mons way more than anything else and people run ting-lu, nacl and the unaware bros to blanket check as much as possible because of that. Theres like 2-3 dedicated defensive mons that frequentely tera (Garg, Dirge) and thats mostly due to tera making them extremely obnoxious to deal with, especially Garg. Everything else is either sweepers/breakers or reactionary tera to deal with those sweepers/breakers that got a 2nd boost from uno-reversing or have adapatability out of nowhere.
Vanilla-tera allows you to get a huge advantage out of any switch you force with any of your sweepers due to tera's huge flexibility. With dedicated tera, counterplay to non-tera mons becomes way easier and you have to spend way less ressources on the mons that are guaranteed to not tera, hence having more ressources to deal with the tera-mon.
Example: You face Roaring Moon (Tera), Volc, Gambit. If the volc forces a switch you no longer have to deal with potential grass/water/fairy volc, you can press rock move and either kill or force it out, same with Gambit. Also you do know RM is the tera-mon and can play more aggressively against it, denying it from setup and keeping your physical wall or revenge killer healthy in the back. Yes, if you decided for Fairy-Dirge in the builder your MU against Tera-RM becomes alot easier, but thats no different from any other metagame. If I run water absorb clod then my rain matchup is alot better, too. Doesnt mean I am gonna complain about MU-fishing if I run into rain without a hard-counter.
Regardless of the outcome of this suspect, the broken stuff is gonna get banned until the top threats become manageable and you have to properly prepare for those like you have to in every other metagame, tera or not.
If Z-moves didnt require item and you assign Z-types to your 6 mons in the builder (only types that they have moves of in their moveset obv), why would you run something like Z-Fly mence? You either give away your Z-mon or you run an unviable mon if you use Z on something else. You would run 6 meta mons and pressure your opponent with the freedom to use Z on either Kart, Lando or Chomp (or w.e your team has). Creativity/Diversity discouraged.
I think this option makes people build more around enabling their own tera-mon and making their own strategy work over countering the opponents, a playstyle similar to Megas/Z-Moves. Maybe its gen 7 nostalgia, but I'd say most people liked that tier alot.
Furthermore, you can also restrict further by showing the tera-type, if necessary. Tactically, if you do want to keep tera for the whole generation, a stronger restriction early on makes people have more faith in restrictive solutions instead of demanding a full-ban ("yeah we tried team-preview and it didnt work out, fuck it just ban this thing"). If the first restriction is more effective, people will be more inclined to give it a try and accept this route. I do believe tera-preview is the absolute minimum that needs to happen, but I do not see that option salvaging tera long-term. 1 Tera per team atleast tries to fix more issues than preview and, imo, is a good restriction for now.
Unfortunately, no restriction (overly complex cart-inaccurate ones excluded) can fix mons getting banned because they are too hard to deal with if you slap tera onto them. We can speculate that its gonna be 3 or 8 or 15 mons getting banned in the future, but in the end its purely speculation. And while I do not like reducing the amount of mons more than absolutely necessary, I can understand why people think differently. I genuinely hope that we can find a restriction that works out without having to sacrifice too many mons but keeping the most interesting and engaging aspects of tera. Generally, the higher the power-level of a tier is, the more problematic tera seems to be (NatDex > OU > UU). Tera probably has to be banned once OU's power-level becomes too high after Home/DLC, but right now I advocate for 1 Tera per team.
To the 3 people who read this wall of text: Thanks for reading.
I'm gonna preface this post by saying I'm someone who doesn't play competitive religiously, but made an account in an attempt to get the requirements needed to vote on this (unfortunately I can only play on my phone and I keep running into issues like random disconnects and other issues, so I wasn't able to get them).
I played over 60 games and got to around 1600 ELO. To me, there was never the 50/50 "the match hinges on this Tera" situation that many people seem to describe, and very rarely was I taken aback by a Tera Type on a mon that I wasn't at least considering. Instead, I often found myself losing matches to mons like Chi-Yu, Chien-Pao, and the occasional Annihilape, and most of the time they didn't even Tera. My opinion is that those mons need to be handled individually before any action is taken on the mechanic.
I played over 60 games and got to around 1600 ELO. To me, there was never the 50/50 "the match hinges on this Tera" situation that many people seem to describe, and very rarely was I taken aback by a Tera Type on a mon that I wasn't at least considering. Instead, I often found myself losing matches to mons like Chi-Yu, Chien-Pao, and the occasional Annihilape, and most of the time they didn't even Tera. My opinion is that those mons need to be handled individually before any action is taken on the mechanic.
Unfortunately, individual mons aren't going to be dealt with until Tera is dealt with, so we will have to wait for those. However, voting starts tomorrow, so I could see some action being taken as early as this weekend.
As for your other ideas, I agree with you. I don't see the 50/50s other players are talking about. Sometimes I get surprised by a tera mon, but I also get surprised by a lot of sets on different Pokemon. It seems like action is going to be taken, but it also looks like tera preview is the #1 option which makes the most sense to me (especially since VGC is doing it but that's not the only reason it's best, other people have articulated it better than I can).
I don't anticipate tera being banned at all, and if I did the reqs process I'd easily vote for no action. These restrictions don't really cut it imo and it's clear they were rushed since less than 5% of people even support the STAB restriction at this point, and the Tera Captain restriction is very flawed as many have pointed out and I think more people are realizing that as well. The revealing tera types at preview is ok I guess, but it seems to be more of a "well we have to do something!" kind of restriction rather than something that anyone believes is the answer to all our troubles. I think tera should remain unrestricted and as time goes on we will either normalize it and accept it as part of the SV metagame or come up with better ideas on how to restrict it while preserving it's competitive appeal.
Yeah I don't think tera will get fully banned, honestly a little disappointed since it feels like a half measure but I understand a lot of people do like it and want to try to work with it. Just hope whatever measure gets implemented will make it more bearable.
ELO is clearly worse than GXE for suspects. The GXE threshold is subject to being changed in the future if there is ample support. More people than ever have gotten reqs here and participation in general is at a peak, so I feel this was set very appropriately.
If you have issues with the requirements used, feel free to PM me or the council like the OP outlined. Posts on this subject here will be marked off-topic because they are not about Tera in SV OU, which is the topic of the thread. Flooding this thread with complaints not only does nothing, but it also shows you ignored something outlined clearly, making the job harder for moderators who volunteer their time maintaining this thread and making public discussions possible to begin with.
The SV OU Terastallization suspect vote will go up at 10 AM GMT-5 (EST), so 10 hours from now.
I have to sync up the voting form with the post of the vote and timelines got in the way, so we will be posting the vote at 10am tomorrow. We will notify everyone at this time. Please do not PM me asking for the vote in the meantime.
